WebDAV search

Hi folks

Just noticed this thread on webdav list, 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/2008JulSep/0000.html 
about a WebDAV Search spec that's maturing.

http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-webdav-search-latest.html

I thought all was quiet on the DASL front for years, but it seems 
there's still work going on. It would be great if SPARQLy people could 
take a look at the spec and figure out any overlaps and opportunities.

Excerpt from draft [[

1. Introduction
1.1. DASL

This document defines Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) 
SEARCH, an application of HTTP/1.1 forming a lightweight search protocol 
to transport queries and result sets that allows clients to make use of 
server-side search facilities. It is based on the expired internet draft 
for DAV Searching & Locating [DASL]. [DASLREQ] describes the motivation 
for DASL. In this specification, the terms "WebDAV SEARCH" and "DASL" 
are used interchangeably.

DASL minimizes the complexity of clients so as to facilitate widespread 
deployment of applications capable of utilizing the DASL search mechanisms.

DASL consists of:

     * the SEARCH method and the request/response formats defined for it 
(Section 2),
     * feature discovery through the "DASL" response header and the 
optional DAV:supported-grammar-set property (Section 3),
     * optional grammar schema discovery (Section 4) and
     * one mandatory grammar: DAV:basicsearch (Section 5).

1.2. Relationship to DAV

DASL relies on the resource and property model defined by [RFC4918]. 
DASL does not alter this model. Instead, DASL allows clients to access 
DAV-modeled resources through server-side search.

]]



In particular, I wonder (from a quick skim) whether other specs can also 
make use of the SEARCH HTTP verb. The example here gives the impression 
this could work:
http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-webdav-search-latest.html#rfc.section.2.3.3

[[
2.3.3. Example: A Simple Request and Response

This example demonstrates the request and response framework. The 
following XML document shows a simple (hypothetical) natural language 
query. The name of the query element is natural-language-query in the 
XML namespace "http://example.com/foo". The actual query is "Find the 
locations of good Thai restaurants in Los Angeles". For this 
hypothetical query, the arbiter returns two properties for each selected 
resource.

 >> Request:

SEARCH / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
Content-Type: application/xml; charset="utf-8"
Content-Length: 252

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<D:searchrequest xmlns:D="DAV:" xmlns:F="http://example.com/foo">
   <F:natural-language-query>
     Find the locations of good Thai restaurants in Los Angeles
   </F:natural-language-query>
</D:searchrequest>
]]

Insights from more careful readers welcomed :)

cheers,

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/

Received on Wednesday, 6 August 2008 12:13:34 UTC